SAP, Oracle Lead Sluggish BI and Analytics Software Market

By Nathan Eddy |
Posted 2014-05-02

The worldwide business intelligence (BI) and analytics software market, which consists of BI platforms, corporate performance management (CPM) suites, analytic applications and advanced analytics, totaled $14.4 billion in 2013, according to a report from IT research firm Gartner.

The report identified a number of factors, which slowed market growth last year, which remained in the single digits, up just 8 percent over 2012's revenue of $13.3 billion.

Macro-economic factors played a large role in the modest growth—no region in the world grew faster than 12 percent last year, the report noted, and confusion still reigns around how to best leverage analytics on big data.

Thirdly, growth in IT budgets remained flat and IT-led traditional BI tools are over-bought, which resulted in some market share leaders targeting those constituents showing sub-market growth.

"Overall, just like last year, the market is shifting gears, which is keeping growth in the single digits. At the same time, paradoxically, we're at the cusp of a series of tipping points which will facilitate unprecedented interest and adoption of analytics," Dan Sommer, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.

On a segment level, data discovery requirements drove growth in BI platforms, indicating a slow but steady shift in emphasis from reporting-centric to analysis-centric tools.

"Analytics is also moving beyond just being a singular tool to become more omnipresent, embedded in various other applications and infrastructures," Sommer continued. "All of these trends, paradoxically to the single-digit growth, cement analytics as a top priority and will tip it to touch a much broader base, down to the personal analytics level."

In the top spot, SAP once again had significantly higher revenue than any other vendor at $3.1 billion with 21.3 percent of the market, up 5.3 percent from 2012. Oracle, which captured the second-largest share of the market (13.9 percent), posted the lowest growth—2.1 percent—among the top five vendors.

Microsoft, which landed in fifth place, enjoyed the highest growth of the top five vendors in 2013, with revenue rising by 15.9 percent compared with 2012, to reach $1.4 billion.

"Right now we're in a trend of proliferating information sources, applications and buying. Those vendors, mainly outside the top 5, that aligned themselves with this caught disproportionally higher interest and growth relative of market share for net new buying, albeit from smaller market footprints," Sommer said. "To counter, the big vendors are expected to dramatically improve their stories around becoming more nimble with data discovery and cloud this year and the next."